Cede
by yopparai
Summary: Despite all their calculations, simulations, estimates, and test runs, neither Trunks nor his mother foresaw the most obvious thing. Yaoi.
1. 1

Disclaimer: I do not own DBZ.

Warning: Yaoi.

* * *

The first time he returns, his mother looks at him, her eyes glinting with either tears or memories, and says, "So?"

He looks at her, a small, tired-looking woman in her overalls and her tool belt, the sharp glare of her immeasurable genius dulled by years of fear and exhaustion and despair, of watching those she loves die one by one.

And he can't say anything.

"Trunks?" She pulls back a little, wary, always wary. "Trunks, what happened?"

He wants to tell her everything is going to be fine. Everything will be fixed, he's accomplished every one of his goals—the medicine dispatched, the threat exposed, the warning delivered. The mission couldn't have been more of a success if he'd found and killed Dr. Gero and destroyed the androids' blueprints himself.

But she can see as well as he can how nothing in their reality has changed.

That leaves him with very little to say.

"Oh, Trunks." His mother smiles, a faint, weary smile. "We knew what the odds were. I did all the calculations myself, remember? We knew the machine might not be able to stay within this space-time continuum. It's all right. At least we stopped them _somewhere_. And who knows? Maybe in their victory, we can figure out a way to defeat our own enemies."

He knows that. That's exactly where his own thought processes jumped the second the probability waves faded and he realized where he was. Besides, he is used to disappointment, to outcomes he didn't expect and doesn't know if he wants. That's all well and good.

That's not what hurts.

"I saw him," he says. It just comes rushing out, he's helpless. "I...I saw him."

His mother's face softens, and she sighs. "I know. Your father always did make an impression—"

But she stops, then, just stops with her mouth open, and she's staring at him, and he thinks that the pain in his gut must be plain to see in his face.

"He was great," says Trunks, and now he's stammering. "Really great. I mean. He just—he wasn't really anything like Gohan. He was—he was really different. He—he smiled all the time, you know? It's like you can't imagine him being serious, but then he turns around and—and just _focuses_, on, on whatever, and it's like—like he's a whole other person? But still the same, because he—he just, he never gives you the feeling that you should be scared or nervous, even though he's Saiyajin and he could destroy the world with a _thought_ if he wanted to, he's just—he's just nice, and you can tell, you can tell how kind he is, and when you're standing next to him, you feel like nothing bad could ever happen again—"

He's talking uncontrollably now, he can't stop himself. His hands are shaking and he clenches them into fists, and he knows he should say something about meeting his father for the first time, except _who cares_, his father was exactly how he'd expected him to be, and anyway he should say something about Gohan as a child and seeing all of her other friends, and seeing _her_, his _mother_, as she was more than twenty years ago—he managed to hold himself together this far, he should be able to keep doing it, just until he can get away from her—

"—and—"

Her hands come down on his arms.

"Trunks." She's crying. No, she's trying not to cry, but the tears are on her face. "Oh, Trunks. It's all right. It's all right, baby, I'm so sorry—"

She puts her arms around him, holds his head to her shoulder like he's still a child, and he lets her because he doesn't want her to see how angry he is. How _furious_.

His eyes are hot and his face is damp, but those are her tears on his cheek. They must be.

"Baby, I'm so sorry," she whispers. "I'm so sorry, I should have—I should have—"

Should have what? Gone herself? Impossible. Told him not to do something stupid, like fall in love? Possibly, but doubtless he wouldn't have listened, much less taken her seriously.

_Come on, it's _Gohan's_ father,_ Trunks remembers saying her to her, once. _It'll be like meeting _my_ dad._

It wasn't. It wasn't.

You should have warned me, he wants to say, wants to yell, wants to howl. You should have warned me! How could you let me go to him, without even warning me—

He holds his mother close, with enough pressure that it must hurt. She doesn't say anything.

If only the man had been nothing like the stories. All those stories, from Mom, from Gohan, from the last few to survive long enough to leave vague memories of a long-dead hero in his young mind, memories all second-hand. Stories of a brave young warrior as kind as he was beloved, killed not in battle but by a sickness in a shocking—_dooming_—injustice.

If only Son Goku hadn't been _exactly_ how Trunks had expected him to be.

In a small, childish, shamed voice, in the same low whisper with which Trunks had once confessed to having nightmares, he tells his mother, "I want to see him again."


	2. 2

Disclaimer: I do not own DBZ.

Warning: Yaoi.

* * *

Sooner rather than later, it becomes clear to Bulma that Trunks will have to go back.

Trunks realizes it, too. She knows to the minute when exactly the inevitability occurred to him, because that was the moment he stopped looking like something she'd found rolled up in some burlap under a ruined city block. He trains for hours every day in the ki-dampening field Bulma developed nearly ten years ago, his face bright in a way she's never seen before. He's always been such a serious boy, premature lines of worry and anger etched into his face by all the losses he shouldn't have to had to endure, the responsibilities he shouldn't have had to shoulder. Seventeen years old and the only protector the world has left, the last line of defense.

It isn't fair, and Bulma knows it.

But it hurts her heart to see her grave little boy in love with a dead man.

Because that's what Son Goku is: dead. No ifs, ands, or buts about it—Goku died nearly twenty years ago, unconscious and in agony. Bulma was there. She saw his last breath, his final heartbeat, the flatlining of his pulse monitor. She was the one who helped Chichi arrange the burial, she was there to see her best and oldest friend go into the ground. Son Goku died, and the world died with him.

_How_ could she not have seen this coming?

She'd been so preoccupied with thoughts of Vegeta. She's spent so many nights awake, worrying about what it would be like for Trunks to finally meet the father he'd never known. Vegeta had always been so—Vegeta. Not even twenty years of death and destruction has done anything to soften Bulma's memories of that infuriating Saiyajin. But at least she is an adult, she'd actually known Vegeta, she's had time to reconcile herself to losing whatever the hell it was that they'd had, if it had even been anything. She made peace with the prince's memory a long time back.

But Trunks—her baby, her little boy. He's always had so many questions about his father, what he was like. Longing to know if he was the sort of son his father would have wanted—and Bulma had never had the heart to answer honestly. One of the last things Vegeta ever said to her was that he had no use for _baseborn half-breed brats_. The bastard had always known how to turn a phrase. Bulma had known—knows—that Vegeta hadn't really meant it, that that had just been him being the Prince of All Saiyajins (like that was worthy anything now), but even so, she's determined to never tell Trunks. She's always thought he wouldn't have been able to understand.

So it had never occurred to Bulma that the danger to her baby wasn't Vegeta.

Which makes her feel stupid. Stupid as all hell. Because she _remembers_ Goku, she remembers him and remembers what it was like to be around him. She remembers what it was like, how to know Goku was to be a little in love with him. He was like a black hole, or a supernova—his influence inescapable. She had talked about it once with Gohan, one night when Trunks was a baby and fast asleep, in one of those brief silences between rampages, and the thing they had both agreed on was how impossible it had been not to love Goku, to want to be around him, to—to some extent—even _want_ him, at least a little.

_Mom was crazy about him,_ Gohan had said. _That's why she put up with so much. She told me once that she was lucky to have gotten to him first, because of all the people who wanted him later. She said she knew Dad would always come home to her, because she was first._ Then, Gohan's voice had lowered. _She used to be really jealous of Piccolo, you know? And...and..._

Gohan had blushed, which had surprised Bulma then because it had seemed to her that Gohan had been too careworn to blush for many years. And maybe anyone else would have thought that Gohan had been about to say _and she was jealous of you_, but Bulma had always been a little too in touch with reality to lie to herself like that.

_And Vegeta,_ she'd finished for him. _Oh, don't look like that, Gohan. I think pretty much the only two people who didn't know Vegeta wanted to get his teeth into Goku were Vegeta and Goku._

Gohan had bitten his lip. _But of course Vegeta would never admit it. Just like Piccolo. And—and do you remember when Turles was here? For Dende's sake! Do you have any idea what it's like for your dad to be the galactic DILF?_

_ Ha! Oh! Oh my gosh, shhh, Gohan, don't make me laugh, I just got Trunks to sleep—_

So Bulma remembers what Goku was like, his face, his eyes, his smile. She knows what it's like to stand next to him and feel completely, totally safe, like nothing could ever touch you. She knew Son Goku when he was a boy and she knew him as a man and then she knew what it was like to watch him die and feel as though all hope was gone.

She'd barely managed to survive Son Goku, and now she's watching her baby walk blindly into that same fire.

The scientist in Bulma tells her that she has to stop this now. _Now, before it's too late,_ says Dr. Briefs. _Now, while it's still only a boy's first love. Extinguish it now, while you still have some influence over your son. Hurt him if you have to, it won't hurt nearly as much now as it does later. Even if he hates you for it, save him _now_._

But the part of her that is a mother...the part of her that knows Trunks, that watched him grow up and still worries over whether he's eating enough or having nightmares, the part of her who knows even before he does how he's going to think things through and what conclusions he'll reach...

This part of her is selfish, and all she can think about is how she wants her baby to just be _happy_ for once, to have something he wants, no matter what the cost is to anything or anyone else.

And on the day Trunks comes to her, his expression shy and guarded and defiant all at the same time, and shows her the blueprints he's drawn up of a standalone time-traveling device based on a smaller version of the probability engine she developed, a device which will not require someone to sit in it but merely be somehow in contact with it—

When he tells her, in a voice that doesn't waver, "I want something like this for the next trip."

That selfish, cruel part of Bulma, the part of her that is a mother looking at her only son, says, "All right."


End file.
